Blinded by gleaming floors
The Listener stands out as being critical of care.
Although the news media can lay some claim to having publicised the kind of abuse cases that spurred the impending inquiry into state care, it gave relatively little attention to the subject during the decades in which the main residences operated.
What coverage there was over the years at issue tended to be highly positive. A feature article in the Evening Post, for instance, gushed about Epuni Boys’ Home’s “highly polished corridors that are maintained by the boys”, and a dedicated secure unit used only, according to the reporter, “in cases where boys are sent by the court following serious offences, to be held for further court appearances, or when boys’ behaviour and attitudes deteriorate so badly that that security is needed to protect themselves”.
Among the few dissenting media voices was the Listener, which provoked impassioned correspondence in its pages after running a sharply critical leader in 1948. It was reckoned to be of such consequence that a small book was later published reproducing both the piece ( Orphanages Without Orphans) and the letters that followed.
The article’s author, Doris Meares Mirams, wrote that the care of wards overall was open to serious criticism, specifically in regard to whether the government had adequate powers of inspection and, if it had, whether those powers were being put to good use by throwing kids into large “homes”.
Mirams argued for the abolition of big institutions in favour of smaller foster-care arrangements that would see problem children in more natural settings. She called for better staff-training opportunities. For the most part, Mirams argued that these “costly, long out-of-date and in no way satisfactory” establishments shouldn’t exist at all.
This morning, the radio system is alive with the harmonies of the all-female singing troupe The Three Degrees, their horny tones no doubt received with some appreciation by the boys, standing in the doorways of their little cubicles clad only in towels and socks, yawning, scratching themselves with tattooed hands and rubbing sleep from their eyes.
Now come the supervisors again, counting heads, checking to see that each bed has been stripped of its linen, favouring each of the boys with a careful stare, followed by a matron to check if any clean bedding is required, especially among the institution’s high number of chronic bed-wetters. Then it’s time to get dressed.
At 7.20am, the boys will silently line up again, this time in the nearby courtyard, for further instructions. There they will
stand, either at ease (arms loosely at sides) or to attention (hands behind back, legs slightly apart, chin facing upward), until the supervisor is satisfied the exercise has been correctly completed. Perhaps the housemaster, as these attendants are known, will dismiss the kids quickly; perhaps he’ll shake his head and keep them standing in line until he’s satisfied it’s straight enough. It depends. It can be daunting, this most common of the super-scheduled day’s correctional exercises.
Work duties will then be announced. Mostly these chores, which are rotated on a weekly basis, involve cleaning of one sort or another, which if nothing else gives the institution that omnipresent scent of cleaning solutions. In the wings, a small posse of pint-sized cleaners fan out along the passageways, industrial-sweepers whirring, whisking any dust or dirt in the corridors and cubicles into neat piles while other boys track them with a half-broom, sweeping the trash into a wastepaper basket.
Someone else follows with a dry mop, doing more or less the same thing, and then, finally, a designated duster comes along brandishing a damp cloth, applying his energy to the tops of chests of drawers, mirrors and ledges. The walls and benches will be repeatedly washed with hot soapy water during the day, door mats taken out and shaken over and over, and let’s not forget the concrete path between the main building and the boiler room, which will be hosed down and swept dry. More or less the same drill will be followed by others in the kitchen and dining areas.
At some point while surveying all this, the onlooker from 2018 would be moved to ask, “What on Earth is the educational point of all this? Why are most of these boys not receiving some kind of educational instruction?”
Although a small classroom is used to give rudimentary lessons to a sprinkling of the wards, the majority of the kids are designated “home boys”, which means their stint at the residence – usually a few months of “assessment” before they are sent to another similar institution or psychiatric hospital – typically passes in this mindless fashion.
The omission is significant because, for much of their history, these places were not overseen by what was then called the Ministry of Social Welfare, despite it usually being fingered for all abuse claims. Over three decades, these largely education-free residences were run by the Department (now Ministry) of Education.
That agency went about its academic duty with a notably light hand. Successive generations of wards emerged better schooled in juvenile delinquency than reading, writing and arithmetic, in a society where educational achievement remains one of the most significant predictors of future career prospects.
About half of the 350 boys who went through Epuni each year attended class, but only so much should be read into that. The bulk of its pupils were in their early teens, but the classroom was graded as a primary school, which meant that staff and pupils enjoyed no automatic access to college materials. The cash-strapped classroom was therefore something of a book-free zone. Yet it was catering to kids whose literacy level (according to one internal estimate) was anything up to seven years below the national average.
The cash-strapped classroom was something of a book-free zone. Yet it was catering to kids whose literacy levels were up to seven years below the national average.
Other school-age kids who remained in the institution for several months, occasionally years, received no formal instruction at all.
Another related issue was “churn”: kids would often be transferred, sometimes quite abruptly, from Epuni to one of the other state-run residences. This frequently had disastrous consequences for the boys’ learning prospects, if indeed they had any further teaching at all.
CONTAINING THE RUNAWAYS
Proceeding along the main passageway of the Epuni residence, turning right into the junior wing, then continuing until the end of the block, the visitor comes to a feature of the institution that will receive much attention in the coming inquiry, but has been largely unremarked on until now. It’s the cell block, or “secure unit”. It takes a minute or two for the right keys to be found to unlock this part of the premises.
The modern use of dedicated cells in juvenile correctional facilities is said to date back to the 1950s, when they were instituted because of the number of children absconding from the homes.
But a closer reading of historical accounts shows the practice began much earlier. At the turn of the 20th century, similar units were known as “detention yards”, open-air cages designed for the containment of what the parliamentary record refers to as “the hardened offenders and defectives of a low type”, and were first put to use by the Education Department in 1903.
These enclosures were designed to supply “a recognition of the absolute necessity for exceptional treatment of a number of boys who might be termed ‘incorrigibles’ … who are at all times and under all conditions are a source of contamination” to other inmates. The pens usually consisted of a piece of ground enclosed by a high fence with an undercover section, presumably for
Stories abound of kids freaking out, banging their heads against the wall until they bled, falling on the floor and assuming a fetal position for hours on end.
use in wet weather. Here “the delinquents do such work as is possible … and they are subjected to, and thoroughly need, very strict discipline”.
Each yard had a special attendant who would accompany the imprisoned boys out for meals in the shared eating space. The period of confinement would last for anything from a few hours to 17 months. The authorities seemed to have liked it as much as their wards hated it. As they used to say at the 19th-century-era Burnham Industrial School for neglected and delinquent children, “no stronger proof” could be adduced of the success of the treatment than its massive unpopularity among the boys.
We didn’t like it at Epuni, either, where even some of the more initially demure inmates were known to slip out of character as soon as the metal doors were shut behind them. Stories abound in the institution’s notebooks of kids freaking out, banging their heads against the wall until they bled, falling on the floor and assuming a fetal position for hours on end, or screaming every time they heard a sudden noise. According to one Government survey, as many as 90% of suicide attempts in all residences occurred in the secure blocks.
The institution once made do with a couple of rooms with thicker panes of glass and a more robust lining. Alas, one of the kids hit on the idea of standing on a tallboy and pushing his head through the ceiling, clambering on to the roof and making off. After one too many such escapes, the department decided something more impressive was required and in 1968 called in the concrete-layers.
The resultant yard, located at the end of the institution’s junior wing, was indeed a proper cell block, complete with reinforced doors, concrete walls and armoured windows in each of the four tiny rooms, two on either side of a small passageway that was always lit, and surrounded on the outside by another security barrier for the unlikely event that somebody managed to break out of a cell.
At the end of the cell block was a larger cell, or activities room, where the boys would be allowed for brief periods of silent exercise. So much silence, so few books. Boys who had been placed in the unit for absconding, in particular, would not be allowed to read anything until their second day, ostensibly because they were said to be in need of sleep, but possibly as a way for them to better meditate on their transgressions.
For the visitor of today, there ought to be much here to meditate on, too. But one additional fact may be the most sobering of all.
The young people you just saw in the hallway pushing dry mops and aimlessly handling industrial cleaning machines, the ones who didn’t make it into a classroom for months or even years, the boys as young as nine years old parked behind cell doors for days at a time eating with plastic spoons and looking out through barred windows. Most of them are Māori.
For the visitor of today, there ought to be much here to meditate on, too. But one additional fact may be the most sobering of all.